With 'Last Call,' Daniel Orkent pours a well-brewed draft of Prohibition history

Ohio Historical SocietyThe march to Prohibition was ignited in 1873 when prominent women in Hillsboro, Ohio, 50 miles east of Cincinnati, picketed and protested in the snow, closing most of the town's saloons.

If there is an extended family untouched by alcohol abuse -- drunken driving, disease -- I don't know about it. It certainly isn't mine.

So I've long been curious about the fierce members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and their indispensable role in Prohibition, the 14 years during which the 18th amendment to the U.S. constitution outlawed "intoxicating liquors."

That radical venture, as Daniel Okrent writes in his fascinating new book, was mostly an abysmal failure: "It encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail and official corruption."

But Eliza Thompson couldn't have known this when she organized 75 Hillsboro, Ohio, women into two columns, led them from the Presbyterian church and, singing hymns, began a Christmas Eve 1873 sit-in at Hillsboro's saloons, hotels and drugstores selling hooch. She was 57 and a devout Methodist who had never spoken in public.

In 11 days, the protest galvanized a nation.

"Thompson and her sisters persuaded the proprietors of nine of the town's thirteen drinking places to close their doors," writes Okrent in "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition."

It shows us how women's suffrage and the fight against "demon rum" were entwined.

"The most urgent reasons for women to want to vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related. They wanted the saloons closed down, or at least regulated. They wanted the right to own property, and to shield their families' financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands."

Scribner, 468 pp., $30Eighty years after the failed experiment, it's hard to get an amen. But "Last Call" makes for rowdy, riveting reading about the characters who got us into Prohibition, and those who dragged us out.

Consequences large and small remain embedded in the national fabric. These include the proliferation of single-issue interest groups, our enjoyment of NASCAR (born out of the Southern men souping-up their cars to outrun customs agents) and the cruise industry, founded in the era's "booze cruises" and "cruises to nowhere" to tipple outside our territorial waters.

In a nation fairly conceived out of the bottom of a bottle, where tea in 1820 cost more than hard liquor, it's a marvel of a political yarn how the 18th amendment passed and was ratified by two-thirds of the states.

The federal income tax, ratified in 1913, made a Prohibition amendment fiscally feasible. The suffragists helped make it politically plausible. The final piece turned out to be World War I.

"The war emergency handed proponents of government activism a hunting license," Okrent writes, letting the feds seize railways, requisition factories, take over mines, fix prices, commandeer all ships, standardize all loaves of bread and draft men.

"Compared to all that, closing down distilleries and breweries didn't seem so radical at all."

"Last Call" should be read slowly -- the book is as dense as German beer. But consuming these pages brings about a similar buzz, delivered in assiduous research, startling anecdotes and yeasty quotes. Okrent writes with verve; he is clearly enjoying himself.

So will his readers, even when it's painful to register the Ku Klux Klan's muscle behind Prohibition and the tainted batch of moonshine that crippled 500 in Wichita, Kan. It is also fascinating to learn that both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln thought Prohibition a terrible idea. Winston Churchill, naturally, called it "an affront to the whole history of mankind."

Bettman/CORBISMore than 40,000 demonstrators demanding legal beer jammed Military Park in Newark, N.J. in 1931 as Prohibition began to crumble. Some 100 bands cheered them on.All those who like inspecting the uses and abuses of power, and the influence of religion, will lap up "Last Call."

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